MEN I HAVE PAINTED
personal intention. Like Francis Bacon's, my own fateful number seems to be fifty-three. It was on the lintel of the door leading into the grounds of Hawarden Castle when I first sought my way there to paint Mr. Gladstone. It is chiselled on a stone inserted in the wall of the garden of The Hermitage; and if ever I write of the houses I have lived in, it will be shown how coincidences have led me to decide upon buying or leasing them. No. 8, Henrietta Street, had always been known to me as Vine House, where my old friend, Henrietta Hind, lived and cultivated a vine which bore such small, neat, and compact bunches of grapes that I at first thought the vine was artificial; so like painted, hammered iron it seemed to be. On the wall, in the hall, Henrietta had hung a large bunch of grapes, carved in wood, to carry on the raison d'être of the name. When, after an absence of two or three years, I found the name changed to Barbizon House, and my old friend and patron, D. Croal Thomson, installed there among a collection of drawings by Brabazon Brabazon, that clever artist who knew how to breathe on to paper in puffs of coloured smoke the most charming skies and lakes, and mountains and Venetian palaces, I began to wonder what magic carpet had effected the harmonious transformation.
Mr. Thomson greeted me with his well-known, genial smile, and took me through all the familiar rooms. He invited me to show the portraits of "Colonel" House I had painted at the Hotel Crillon in Paris, and with great generosity placed the rooms at my disposal. He was full of anecdotes about himself and his strange experiences with artists and doctors, some of which I cannot discreetly divulge. But there is one that so generously displays his love of fair criticism that it must be recorded. A letter had
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